Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

"'Kristin, my dearest love,' begged Erlend in despair.  'Oh, Kristin, I know I've come to you much too late...'

Again a tremor passed over his wife's face.

'It's not too late,' she said, her voice low and harsh.  She stared down at her son, who lay in a swoon in her arms.  'Our last child is already in the ground, and now it's Lavrans's turn.  Gaute has been banished by the Church, and our other sons...  But the two of us still own much that can be ruined, Erlend!'"  (Kristin Lavransdatter, p. 973)

Kristin Lavransdatter (Penguin Classics, 2005)

by Sigrid Undset (translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally)

Norway, 1920-22

While I must have spent hundreds of Kristin Lavransdatter's 1124 pages trying to figure out whether inept storyteller Sigrid Undset was a bigger embarrassment to Scandinavian culture than lame-o pretentious pop star Bjork, I've decided to try to shy away from personal attacks now that Undset's historical fiction Beaches has finally reached its long drawn out tear-jerker of a conclusion.  Still, what exactly have I taken from this experience?  First, for all the people who seem to want to fawn over her for merely having created a birth-to-death portrait of a fictional woman with "realistic" flaws, Undset strikes me as an extraordinarily lazy writer.  Probably because she's so bad at dialogue, she spends endless amounts of time laboriously filling the reader in on what each character thinks and what each person looks like.  Very boring.  Second, Undset apparently never met a contrived situation she didn't like--in the key reunion between Kristin and Erlend in the passage above and in Kristin's final saintly acts when the Black Death comes to her convent, I was actually moved to laughter by Undset's cheap, Spielbergian theatrics.  No sense of subtlety whatsoever.  And even though The Cross was probably a slightly less annoying reading experience for me than either The Wreath or The Wife, I'm tempted to suggest that some of that sense of "improvement" was only noticeable due to the fact that the preceding books in the trilogy set the bar so low.  In short, a tedious and manipulative story unimaginatively told.  Refund! (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Sigrid "Woe is Me" Undset

Non-Satanic Devil's Advocates

I'll link other Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross readalong posts below as soon as I can get to them, but thanks to everybody who read along with Emily and me and/or visited the various readalong blogs to join in on the discussions.  It was a lot of fun despite the novel in question!  If you've read the trilogy, please let me what you think of it--and if you haven't, please be aware that a certain online bookseller giant's website (let's call it Big Mythological Warrior Gal.com for the moment since this isn't one of those whorish book blogs that tries to pimp books for money) is actually full of raves of KL along the likes of the following:  "The saga covers every human emotion and possibility that can occur to a human being."  OK, I stand corrected!  I wasn't bored to death by Undset after all!!  Psyche!!!

Emily (Evening All Afternoon)
Claire (kiss a cloud)
Gavin (Page247)
Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

The Moro Affair

The Moro Affair [L'Affaire Moro] (NYRB Classics, 2004)
by Leonardo Sciascia (translated from the Italian by Sacha Rabinovitch)
Italy, 1978

On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, then president of the Christian Democratic Party and a former two-time Prime Minister of Italy, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in an operation that left five of Moro's bodyguards dead.  From his place of detention, Moro was permitted to send several letters to his family, various politicians, and the Pope requesting that something be done to enable his release or he would soon die at the hands of his captors.  Since many of the letters were published in the press, Moro's fate quickly became a national spectacle. Within two months, the once powerful politician was assassinated after the Italian government made it abundantly clear to the Brigate Rosse that they weren't about to participate in a prisoner exchange with terrorists.  A matter of principle for the government or just a shameful waste of a life?  This is the key question for Sciascia at the heart of The Moro Affair.   While he doesn't spare the Red Brigades his wrath over the injustice they've committed, he's equally scornful about the state's intransigence in allowing this apparently preventable death to take place.  Taking both the killers and the politicians to task for their actions, he delivers a withering broadside aimed at Italian politics--and by extension, society--that's delivered with an almost Ciceronian insistence.  A penetrating look at a horrible chapter in recent Italian history, Sciascia's report is, somewhat surprisingly given the pessimistic context, also effectively informed by a range of literary references (Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," Martín Luis Guzmán's The Eagle and the Serpent, Pasolini, Pirandello, Tolstoy, etc.) on life imitating art.  Brutal.  Depressing.  Recommended.  (NYRB Classics)
*
El caso Aldo Moro [L'Affaire Moro]
por Leonardo Sciascia
Italia, 1978

En el 16 de marzo de 1978, Aldo Moro, el presidente del partido Democracia Cristiana Italiana en aquel entonces e un ex-primer ministro de Italia, fue secuestrado por las Brigadas Rojas en una operación que dejó muertos los cinco escoltas  de Moro.  Desde su lugar de detención, Moro fue permitido mandar varias cartas a su familia, a otros políticos, y al Papa buscando ayuda--porque sin un acuerdo, él iba a morir a las manos de sus apresadores.  Porque muchas de las cartas fueron publicadas en los periódicos, el destino de Moro se convertió en un espectáculo nacional. Dentro de dos meses, el político antiguamente poderoso fue asesinado cuando el gobierno italiano decidió que no iban a negociar con los terroristas de las Brigate Rosse en cuanto a un canje de prisioneros.  ¿Un asunto entendible de principios nobles o un acto vergonzoso por parte del gobierno?  Ésta es la pregunta clave para Sciascia al centro de El caso Aldo Moro.  Mientras que él no exculpa a las Brigadas Rojas por su responsibilidad en cometer la injusticia, también desdeña la intransigencia del Estado por permitirla pasar una muerte aparentemente "evitable".  Criticando a los dos grupos de asesinos y de políticos por sus acciones, él pronuncia un andanada verbal contra el sistema político italiano--y por extensión, la sociedad italiana--que es casi Ciceroniano en su insistencia.  Una mirada aguda a un capítulo horrible de historia italiana reciente, el informe de Sciascia es, sorprendentemente dado el contexto pesimista de la obra, también efectivamente informado por un abanico de referencias literarias ("Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" de Borges, El Águila y el Serpiente de Martín Luis Guzmán, Pasolini, Pirandello, Tolstoy, etcétera) sobre el arte y la vida.  Brutal.  Deprimente.  Recomendado.  (N.B.  Para una edición de esta obra en castellano, veáse el libro publicado por Ediciones Destino.)

Leonardo Sciascia

The U.S. edition of Sciascia's The Moro Affair (L'Affaire Moro) actually contains two superb history pieces written by the Sicilian novelist: the 1978 title essay and a second work from 1975 translated here as The Mystery of Majorana (La Scomparsa di Majorana).  Somewhat more speculative in nature than The Moro Affair, The Mystery of Majorana concerns a famous physicist who disappeared during Mussolini's reign--perhaps, Sciascia suggests, because he saw the future of the atomic bomb and didn't want to be part of such a science anymore.  Intriguing.

*

La edición estadounidense de El caso Aldo Moro (The Moro Affair [L'Affaire Moro]) de Sciascia incluye dos ensayos históricos escritos por el novelista siciliana: lo del título y otro que se llama La desaparición de Majorana (The Mystery of Majorana [La Scomparsa di Majorana]).  Un poco más especulativo que El caso Aldo Moro, La desaparición de Majorana trata de un físico famoso que desapareció durante el regno de Mussolini--quizá, sugiere Sciascia, porque anticipara el futuro de la bomba atómica y no quiso ser parte de un tal ciencia.  Interesante.

The Satyricon

The Satyricon (Oxford University Press, 2009)
by Petronius (translated from the Latin by P.G. Walsh)
Rome, c. 63-65

Whatever your take on the "1st century" culture wars that would eventually usher in a new holiday shopping season for much of mankind, you have to admit that the ancient Romans were at least a good twelve or thirteen hundred years ahead of the curve on the Christians in combining comedy with sleaze.  Petronius' raunchy The Satyricon (what P.G. Walsh translates as "a recital of lecherous happenings" on page xv of his very useful introduction) is of course one of the classic cases in point, a bisexual love triangle-cum-road movie hybrid (so to speak) sometimes hailed as the oldest extant novel. Does it live up to all the hype?  Yes and no but mostly yes.  While the missing portions of the text and some of the inside jokes make for a choppy reading experience at times, the author's comic sensibilities and the episodic nature of the plot--with events set in motion by the narrator Encolpius' unexplained offense committed against the revenge-minded god Priapus--are pretty much a perfect match in terms of the amusement opportunities they generate.  The chapter on the "Dinner at Trimalchio's," an extended send-up of a vulgar freedman-turned-nouveau riche who hosts a ridiculously extravagant banquet, is Hall of Fame material as satire, but Petronius is also quite the comedic stud lampooning intellectual posturers, mischievously questioning whether true love is really just lust most of the time, and mixing poetry with prose with freewheeling élan.  Although it's too bad that more literature from the Age of Nero hasn't survived, anybody who knows how and why Petronius died will understand at least one root cause of the problem.  A "naughty" classic.  (www.oup.com/worldsclassics)

Petronius Arbiter

"Petronius deserves a brief obituary.  He spent his days sleeping, his nights working and enjoying himself.  Others achieve fame by energy, Petronius by laziness.  Yet he was not, like others who waste their resources, regarded as dissipated or extravagant, but as a refined voluptuary.  People liked the apparent freshness of his unconventional and unselfconscious sayings and doings.  Nevertheless, as governor of Bithynia and later as consul, he had displayed a capacity for business.

Then, reverting to a vicious or ostensibly vicious way of life, he had been admitted into the small circle of Nero's intimates, as Arbiter of Taste: to the blasé emperor nothing was smart and elegant unless Petronius had given it his approval.  So Tigellinus, loathing him as a rival and a more expert hedonist, denounced him on the grounds of his friendship with Flavius Scaevinus.  This appealed to the emperor's outstanding passion--his cruelty.  A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius.  No defence was heard.  Indeed, most of his household were under arrest..."  (Tacitus [translated by Michael Grant], The Annals of Imperial Rome, XVI [London: Penguin Classics, 1996, pp. 389-390])

La Virgen de los Sicarios

La Virgen de los Sicarios (Punto de Lectura, 2006)

por Fernando Vallejo

México, 1994

Luego de leer la nefasta segunda parte de la telenovela en prosa que se llama Kristin Lavransdatter (Noruega, 1920-22), me era grato poder leer la sumamente atrevida La Virgen de los Sicarios de Fernando Vallejo.  Una especie de jeremiada contra la violencia colombiana ambientada en los '90, esta novela breve sigue en los pasos del narrador, otro Fernando, recién llegado a su ciudad natal de Medellín después de una ausencia de muchos años en el extranjero.  Enamorándose con un teenager de arrabal que trabaja como sicario, o asesino a sueldo, el cincuentón Fernando cuenta su historia de amor con Alexis mientras que lanza denuncia tras denuncia contra sus prójimos, el gobierno y Dios durante sus recorridos a lo largo de la ciudad.  Mientras tanto, el joven Alexis sigue asesinando a docenas de víctimas con toda la impunidad de un Ángel Éxterminador: casi si fuera cumpliendo las esperanzas de Fernando, que se limita a la violencia verbal como el buen gramático que lo es.  Aunque el punto de vista del narrador es nihilista en sumo grado, me gustaron su retrato del caos urbano (lo cual me pareció fidedigno) y el poder desenfrenado de su lenguaje (de hecho, la novela se lee como un Trópico de Cáncer dedicado a la rabia).  No sé si el autor sea tan misantrópico como su tocayo, pero el realismo y el pesimiso de este librazo probablemente se deben al hecho de que Vallejo mismo creció en Medellín antes de mudarse a México para siempre.  Un éxito vituperioso.  (http://www.puntodelectura.com/)
*
Our Lady of the Assassins [La Virgen de los Sicarios] (Serpent's Tail, 2001)
by Fernando Vallejo (translated from the Spanish by Paul Hammond)
Mexico, 1994

After suffering through the dreadful second part of that soap opera in prose known as Kristin Lavransdatter (Norway, 1920-22), it was completely gratifying for me to be able to read Fernando Vallejo's daring Our Lady of the Assassins next.  A sort of jeremiad against Colombian violence set in that country in the '90s, this novella follows in the footsteps of its narrator, another Fernando, who has recently returned to his hometown of Medellín after an absence of many years spent abroad.  Having fallen for a neighborhood teenager who works as a sicario, or an assassin for hire, the 50-something Fernando recounts his doomed love affair with Alexis while launching one diatribe after another against his fellow man, the government, and God during the lovers' walks throughout the city.  Meanwhile, the young Alexis continues killing dozens of victims with all the impunity of an exterminating angel--almost as if he were fulfilling the wishes of Fernando, who tends to limit himself to verbal violence like the good grammarian he is.  Although the narrator's point of view is nihilistic in the extreme, I enjoyed both his portrayal of the urban chaos (very credible, it would seem) and the unrestrained power of his language (imagine a Tropic of Cancer devoted to and consumed with its own wrath).  And while I don't know if the author's as misanthropic as his literary namesake, the heightened realism and the pessismism of this work probably owe a lot to the fact that Vallejo himself grew up in Medellín before moving to Mexico for good.  A vituperative knockout.   (www.serpentstail.com)

Fernando Vallejo

"Saliendo de conocer la iglesia de Robledo (un galponcito desangelado en donde a duras penas se para mi Dios), decidimos seguir pendiente arriba en busca de un mirador en la montaña para divisar a Medellín, para apreciarlo en su conjunto con la objetividad que da la distancia, sin predisposiciones ni amores.  A mano izquierda subiendo, en una finquita vieja, un rodadero con un platanar seco, abandonado, leíase el siguiente anuncio en mayúsculas torcidas y desflecadas, como para cartel de Drácula: SE PROHÍBE ARROJAR CADÁVERES.  ¿Se prohíbe?  ¿Y esos gallinazos qué?  ¿Qué era entonces ese ir y venir de aves negras, brincando, aleteando, picoteando, patrasiándose para sacarle mejor las tripas al muerto?  Como un niño travieso, haga de cuenta usted, jalándole la cuerda a un payasito de cuerda que ya no hará más payasadas en esta vida.  ¿El cadáver de quién?  ¡Y yo qué sé!  Nosotros no lo matamos.  De un hijo de su mamá.  Cuando pasábamos ya estaba ahí, y en plena fiesta los gallinazos e invitando más.  Lo tostaron y ahí lo tiraron violando el anuncio, de donde se deduce que: mientras más se prohibe menos se cumple.  Sería en vida una bellecita?  ¿O un 'man' malevolo?  'Man' aquí significa como en inglés, hombre.  Nuestros manes, pues, no son los espíritus protectores.  Por el contrario, son humanos e hideputas, como dijo Don Quijote".  (La Virgen de los Sicarios, p. 47)

"Coming out of the church in Robledo for the first time (a soulless little shed in which God prospers with great difficulty), we decided to continue up the slope in search of a vantage point on the mountain to see Medellín from, and to admire it as a single entity with the objectivity distance lends, with neither prejudice nor love.  On the left going up, on an old property, a steep bit of hillside with a withered, abandoned banana grove on it, you could read the following notice in crooked and half erased capital letters, like on a Dracula poster: THE DUMPING OF BODIES IS FORBIDDEN.  Forbidden?  What about those turkey buzzards over there?  What was all that toing and froing then of big black birds, hopping about, flapping their wings, pecking, bracing themselves in order to hoick out the dead man's guts more easily?  Like a naughty child, mark you, tugging the string of a little marionette who won't be doing any more clowning in this life.  Whose corpse was it?  How should I know!  We weren't the ones who killed him.  Some mother's son.  When we passed by he was already there, with the buzzards having a great time and inviting others to come join the party.  They did for him and they tossed him there in violation of the notice, from which one deduces that the more one forbids, the less one achieves.  Had he been a hunk in life?  Or a bad man?  Our manes, whether it means men or dead souls, are not protective spirits.  On the contrary, they're humans and whoresons, as Don Quixote said."  (Our Lady of the Assassins, pp. 46-47 [translated by Paul Hammond])

Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

Kristin Lavransdatter Readalong, Part Two

"Suddenly Kristin was overcome by violent sobs; she hardly knew what she was crying about."  (Kristin Lavransdatter, II: The Wife, p. 562)

While I'm mostly over feeling guilty about inviting so many trusting people to read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy along with Emily and me (my bad), the shame and the embarrassment definitely linger on as this singularly uninvolving work continues to take shape as an 1,100 page Norwegian print version of a Lifetime channel drama or something. For whatever Undset's storytelling goals in The Wife, she's clearly her own worst enemy as a narrator--constantly undermining the flow of the narrative with the title character's endless crying jags, jealous whining about family members, and non-stop brooding.   To make matters worse, the flair for landscape scenes that I found at least partially appealing in The Wreath has now been replaced with completely superfluous descriptions about people's appearance at every turn.  Right after one of the occasions in which Erlend has struck Kristin, for example, we get the following odd insight into Erlend's state of mind: "Oh, his wife's quiet and dignified bearing was as lovely as the willowy grace of the young maiden had been; she was wider in the bosom and hips, but she was also taller.  She held herself erect, and her neck bore the small, round head as proudly and beautifully as ever.  Her pale, remote face with the dark-gray eyes stirred and excited him as much as her round, rosy child's face had stirred and excited his restless soul with its wondrous calm" (610).  While it would be nice to think that Undset's actually getting at something here--some truth about the husband and wife dynamic, some hint about gender relations in 14th-century Norway--I sincerely doubt there's any method to her madness: The Wife is filled with similarly empty, sometimes outright laughable descriptions about people from all walks of life, and no amount of "authentic medieval" references to the licking of festering eye wounds or of an adult giving hickeys to the twelve year old sister of an ex-fiancée of his can mask Undset's undeniably conformist tendencies as a narrator.  And with the novel's two most interesting characters, Lavrans and Ragnfrid, now dead, the only suspense left in part three for me will be seeing how schmaltzy things get as Undset prepares for the big sentimental finale with that lack of subtlety that she has so clearly established as her calling card.  To borrow a quip from an old punk rock fanzine friend of mine, "g-e-n-e-r-i-c gets easier and easier to spell every day"!  (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Sigrid Undset and her dog Erlend

Other readalong posts on The Wife:

Emily (Evening All Afternoon)

Amy (New Century Reading)

Claire (kiss a cloud)

E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)

Gavin (Page247)

Jill (Rhapsody in Books)

Lena (Save Ophelia)

Sarah (what we have here is a failure to communicate)

softdrink (Fizzy Thoughts)

Valerie (Life Is a Patchwork Quilt)

Senselessness

Senselessness [Insensatez] (New Directions, 2008)
by Horacio Castellanos Moya (translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver)
Guatemala and Mexico, 2004

As I grudgingly make my way through the entertainment no man's land that is the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (update post later in the week), I'm happy to report that a novel about fucking genocide of all things has provided quite the welcome distraction.  In this short but incendiary novel, an unnamed narrator from an unnamed Latin American country is hired to be the copy editor in yet another unnamed Lat Am country for the latter land's 1,100 page human rights report on military atrocities committed against its indigenous population (although the particular countries are never mentioned, internal clues tip us off to the fact that the narrator's a refugee from El Salvador working in Guatemala before Bishop Gerardi's assassination). While polishing the report, the horrors of the testimony ("I am not complete in the mind" admits one man who has watched his wife and four children be hacked to death by machetes [1-2]; "There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them" says another survivor [51]) and the narrator's own personal demons (alcoholism, drug dependency, womanizing, unspecified "personal problems") combine to haunt the character to the point that he's gradually turned into a raving paranoiac wreck in fear for his own life.  Rightly or wrongly. What follows is both predictable and unpredictable in more or less equal measure, an outcome I attribute more to the challenge of confronting genocide through fiction than the novelist's own chops as a writer.  For if the trajectory of the novel was telegraphed a little too far in advance for my tastes and its first person tone was too over the top for its own good on occasion, Castellanos Moya's prose in general throughout and a brutally ironic ending still seemed worthy of his grim subject matter.  Put that in your historical fiction pipe and smoke it, ladies.  (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Note: I read this book in translation because I couldn't find the original Spanish version of Insensatez at my university library or local foreign language bookstore.  For more on Castellanos Moya's own background and writing, check out this profile here and a piece he did on his friend Bolaño Inc. here.

Chess Story

Chess Story [Schachnovelle] (NYRB Classics, 2006)
by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg)
Brazil, 1942

Before any of you out there rush to commend me for my rare fiscal restraint in borrowing a book from the library rather than just buying it as usual, please be advised that the unrestrained ugliness of the cover above likely had a tremendous amount to do with the decision (note to the NYRB Classics design team: in a week in which Frances the Book Temptress just posted on an exquisite series of new Nabokov cover art that has everybody and his brother drooling, "thanks" for leaving me holding the bag here with that "trippy" 1980s science fiction fanzine level shite of yours that mars an otherwise fine publication).  All grumbling about design matters aside, the content in Zweig's 84-page novella provided for an altogether ace introduction to this previously unread by me Austrian writer.  While the plot sounds rather inauspicious in terms of the excitement level to be expected--the passengers on board an NYC to Buenos Aires ocean liner discover that the world champion chess master Mirko Centovic is on board and challenge him to a couple of pay-for-play matches pitting the group of seemingly outmatched amateurs against the arrogant champion--the story's told with such first-person verve that I can understand why it's hard to avoid Zweig review sightings when trolling through the blogosphere.  Whether you enjoy the nervewracking battle of wills that ensues as straight entertainment or prefer one of the more allegorical readings of the chess story that I've seen (the bumbling passengers ineptly facing up to the rude, Hitlerian Centovic as WWII rages on in the background), you'll prob. be impressed with Zweig's deceptively simple prose and ability to ratchet up the emotional tension without Sigrid Undset-like histrionics.  For those of you already familiar with this author's work, perhaps one of you would be so good as to tell me whether I should read Beware of Pity or The Post-Office Girl next.  They're both now on "the list."  (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Stefan Zweig

P.S. Although I intentionally left out "key information" about a major character in Chess Story above to try and preserve at least one element of surprise for new readers of the work, Zweig's own sad story deserves at least a footnote here: a refugee from the Nazi war machine, he fled Europe for South America before eventually killing himself in a suicide pact with his wife in Brazil in 1942.  The completed manuscript of Schachnovelle was found among his belongings at his death--apparently expressly intended for posthumous publication.